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In Defense of Secrecy

Julie Salamon is the author of “Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein.”

I GREW up hating secrets.

At age 10 I learned from my cousins that my father had been married before and that his first wife and their little girl were killed in Auschwitz. When I was a senior in high school, my father became ill with lung cancer, information withheld from me until he died that summer — while I was in Australia on a trip that was a graduation gift from my parents. My mother wanted to wait until I returned home, weeks later, to tell me, but my sister persuaded her to make the dreaded call.

No surprise that my favorite childhood novel was “Jane Eyre” (with secrecy at its core, the “ghost” stashed conveniently in the attic) or that the title of my first book was “White Lies.” Transparency became my watchword, journalism my profession.

In the last three years, I’ve been consumed with the subject of secrets while I’ve been writing a biography of Wendy Wasserstein, the New York playwright who dedicated herself to controlling narrative, in both her life and her work. She grew up in a family so private that when relatives died, it was said, “They went to Europe.” She was in her 20s when she learned that her two oldest siblings had a different father from that of the other children. She was almost 50 years old when she first met one of her brothers, who had lived apart from the family since boyhood, when illness left him developmentally disabled.

No surprise to me that Wasserstein became a writer who appeared to epitomize transparency. Before Facebook existed, through her plays and essays, she created a public persona who became so familiar that strangers stopped her on the street to ask about her mother, her diets, whom she was dating. When I told people the subject of my book, the almost inevitable response was, “How is Wendy’s daughter?” They all seemed to remember the article Wasserstein wrote 11 years ago, barely off the delivery table, about her decision to have a baby as a single mother, at age 48, and the difficult, almost miraculous birth of her daughter, who weighed in at less than two pounds. The story was published in The New Yorker; the Wasserstein baby shower was duly recorded by a reporter from The New York Times.

Despite this outpouring of revelation, after Wasserstein died, five and a half years ago at age 55, even those closest to her were stunned by how much they didn’t know. What was the nature of her relationships with the men — gay and straight — she called her “husbands” and why did none of her “best friends” know how gravely ill she was until the very end of her life? Her obituaries were inconsistent. Some said there were four Wasserstein siblings, while others reported, correctly, that there were five. It turned out that the woman people thought they knew so well was a mystery to all of them.

Wasserstein’s secrecy became, posthumously, the subject of public conjecture. Several months after her death, Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and columnist who had been a close friend of the playwright’s, addressed the question directly. “How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up?” he asked. “I don’t think I was the only friend who felt I had somehow failed to see Wendy whole. And who wondered if I had let her down in some profound way. I grieve as much for the Wendy I didn’t know as the Wendy I did.”

Implicit in Mr. Rich’s lament and my own pursuit of Wasserstein’s essential truths is the notion that secrets are inevitably harmful and the desire for privacy somehow suspect, and neurotic, if not downright nefarious. Wasserstein became a voice for the baby boom generation, the cohort whose legacy will include reality television and social media, as well as the apparent dissolution of boundaries between public and private, the changing parameters of intimacy and revelation.

BUT maybe secrecy and privacy have become too easily conflated when they are, in fact, quite different. Before endless sharing and complete transparency became the norm, it was understood that privacy was a kind of sanctuary, a refuge from the selves we presented to the world. Embarrassing family snapshots weren’t unexpectedly tagged on the Internet; you could hide your age if you were so inclined. Wendy Wasserstein’s life certainly suggests the possibility that she treated her private life as a kind of protected space.

Today we baby boomers worry that nothing is hidden, except maybe the Internet identities our children might assume. We thought we wanted openness, full transparency, in all realms. Our parents were so leery of outside scrutiny that mundane matters were given the status of high-level security; my husband’s mother forbade her children to reveal any illness more serious than a cold.

Photo

Credit
Vivienne Flesher

For my parents’ generation, secrecy was a way to survive; dwelling on the past could only drag you down. That belief served my mother well: now in her 80s, she survived Auschwitz (but lost her parents there) and went on to travel the world, become a shrewd businesswoman, have a family and carry on after the deaths of two remarkable husbands. She’s had an epic life containing monumental dislocation and loss as well as much satisfaction.

Lola Wasserstein, Wendy’s mother, depended on a similar strategy. She dealt with grave upsets — including the death of her first husband — while in her 20s, but opted to ignore these intricate heartaches, focusing instead on becoming the person she chose to be. Her son Bruce Wasserstein spoke with me shortly before he died in 2009. “It’s not that there were secrets,” he said. “Things were just not talked about, never mentioned. It was what my parents wished.”

Certainly Lola’s secrecy — the things that were never mentioned — didn’t obstruct her children’s successes and most likely was the catalyst for them. Her oldest daughter, Sandra, became a top executive at a time when executive assistant was the highest-ranking position available to most women. Bruce became a billionaire, part of the group Tom Wolfe dubbed “masters of the universe” in the 1980s, eventually taking over as chairman of Lazard, the powerful Wall Street investment firm whose business depends on secrecy. Wendy won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for her success as a fabulist, her creativity fueled by her ability to take the raw stuff of life and transform it into art.

Lola’s evasions, petty and profound, helped form the bittersweet comic sensibility that became Wendy Wasserstein’s trademark. As a friend told her, “You were born into great material.”

Lola seemed to hide everything — her age, her real name, the actual details of her childhood in Poland, always presenting a gauzy portrait of privilege that Wendy came to doubt as well as to appreciate. “I always placed the truth of the summer villa right alongside my mother’s sworn testimony to me in eighth grade that grown women would pay thousands of dollars for hair like mine, especially when it divided into thousands of damaged, frizzy split ends,” Wasserstein wrote. “It might have been more than a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly comforting.”

Despite this public insouciance, Wasserstein was persistently unsettled by family secrets. She found it difficult to know what was real and what wasn’t. While she was at Yale Drama School, in the 1970s, she discovered that her deceased Uncle George had also been her mother’s first husband. In a journal, she recorded her reaction:

“I have a reputation in my family for being ‘emotional’ and ‘emotional’ is synonymous with high-strung. The best thing would be not to dwell on the fact that my older sister was suddenly my cousin. The best thing would be never to ask my mother about George because his dying must have upset her enough to begin with.”

WASSERSTEIN’S awareness of her mother’s foibles didn’t stop her from repeating them. From an early age, she maintained an aura of secrecy, rarely revealing her true feelings. Her freshman year at Mount Holyoke, she was a self-avowed “misfit” who turned everything into a funny story, even her grades, which were the worst she’d ever had. When she told her roommate, an A student, that she didn’t want to room with her the next year, without explanation, the roommate was hurt and perplexed, having no idea what the trouble was.

Thirty years later Wasserstein sent her a copy of her book “Shiksa Goddess,” a collection of essays, including one called “Women Beware Women.” There the roommate discovered the answer to a mystery that had troubled her from time to time over the years.

“I moved out on my college roommate at a time when she thought we were the closest of friends,” wrote Wasserstein. “She was too smart; I was flunking.”

The former roommate realized Wasserstein’s nonchalance had been an act, a cover-up for her secret shame. When she called Wasserstein to discuss the book, she said, “Wendy, I didn’t know you had something in there about us.”

Wasserstein laughed and said, “I wondered if you’d ever notice.”

Wasserstein died before her method — hiding in plain sight — had become a commonplace phenomenon, available to anyone with even modest computer skills. Even my 88-year-old mother is on Facebook. I may hate secrets but I, too, have felt the motherly impulse to shield my children from bad news. I love the Internet, which allowed me to track down remote acquaintances of Wasserstein’s in hours rather than weeks. So that makes me a snoop who doesn’t like secrets but occasionally resorts to them, while treasuring privacy. Good luck to me — and everyone else — in figuring out where one begins and the other ends.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 21, 2011, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: In Defense of Secrecy. Today's Paper|Subscribe